


his angels were cast out with him

by azurish



Series: and there was a war in heaven [1]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:57:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7314295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“In a different world, she might have been protected by this woman.  In a different world, she herself might protect this woman.”</i>
</p><p>Milady and Ninon, in “A Rebellious Woman.” A fic that came about because I felt that all the implications of lesbianism in that episode were well and good, but someone ought to have made them deliver on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	his angels were cast out with him

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for brief allusions to past torture. Title and series title from Revelation 12:7-10: “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.”

            Ninon de Larroque is a foolish woman, easily trapped in the web of lies the Cardinal spins around her.  But she is foolish in the way good people are foolish: she does not understand why women would betray each other, she does not understand that she can still be attacked despite having lived a blameless life, she does not understand that bad endings befall good people.  Milady is not even sure Ninon understands _why_ the Cardinal is destroying her life; the comtesse is so caught up in the small world she has built for herself and her women between the book-laden walls of her salon that Milady fancies she has never taken the time to peer out through the glass at the machinations of _men_.  She may have read about the Spanish expeditions to the New World, perhaps marveled over _De orbe novo_ or raged at las Casas’s _Brevísima relación_ ; but she surely has not traced out how the Spaniards’ flexing of their naval muscles has provoked Louis’s childish desire to match their nautical might.  After all, Ninon hardly seems to have perceived that the walls separating her from the world were fragile and transparent.  A woman who believed the outside world could never touch her – who spurned taking her turn at the games of court that could so easily have kept her safe – would not have paid attention to the nasty court politics of quietly shifting alliances, to the fact that the Cardinal needed _just_ enough money to give Louis the sort of navy that would satisfy him without enraging the Spanish.

            And Ninon de Larroque is doubly a fool, because she could have so easily avoided her fate.  The King is half in love with her already; a few turns around the garden and she could have wound him around her little finger.  And, wonder of all wonders, Queen Anne seems so taken by Ninon’s strident crusading that admiration has overridden whatever jealousy her husband’s praise must provoke.  Even if Luca has turned Richelieu against her, there are ways to avoid the Cardinal’s ire.  A few words with the King, a few much franker words with the Queen, and a brief retreat to the countryside, during which time Richelieu’s gaze would have fallen on someone else, perhaps.  Richelieu needs the funds for the navy quickly, and he isn’t willing to expend too much political capital.  If Ninon had even _tried_ , she could have avoided her capture, her imprisonment, and this trial.

            Milady has never had much time for fools.  But she has seen many such men and women undone by the Cardinal before, and she has never felt _angry_ like this.  Angry at Ninon for so entirely failing to avert her fate; angry at the Cardinal for seeing an easy target in Ninon; angry at the world for so easily falling for Milady’s insinuations at the trial.  Milady has ruined men and women for the Cardinal many times; she knows the steps of this dance, the words she needs to utter before the tribunal, the exact right balance to strike between prurient innuendos and allegations of heresy.  She should not be surprised that – barring Athos’s brief and embarrassing loss of control – the crowd laps up the whole act.  But she finds herself furious that they fall for it nevertheless.

            “Why are you saying these things?” Ninon demands, and Milady knows exactly what bargains she has made – with the devil, with the Cardinal, with Thomas, with France – and why she has made them, but she does not know why she has to damn this woman as well.  She does not know why the world will stand by and _let_ this woman be damned.

            This world, as she tells the Cardinal later, is hell.  But she thinks that Ninon does not deserve hell.  Ninon belongs with the angels.  Ninon is resplendent, beautiful in a harsh, strong way that challenges men’s comfortable notions of delicacy and feminine loveliness.  Her striking features could have been carved from marble and her hair gleams like a gilt halo.  But more than that, the righteous fire animating her blue eyes burns with an unearthly intensity.  She could be the incarnation of Michael, justice taken human form.  Justice taken women’s form, because Ninon has somehow managed to take all the women of France into the depths of her great heart and she will fight to her dying breath to protect them.

            Milady uses that protective impulse against her that night, goes to her cell and threatens the women of her salon to make Ninon confess.  Once again, she _knows_ why she is doing this, but the words still curdle in her mouth.  Ninon burns with the sort of passionate solidarity Milady had needed, back when a marriage built on lies to a nobleman had seemed like the only path to safety and stability for a poor woman with no reputation, and Milady is using it to destroy her.

            Milady wonders what would have happened had she met Ninon back before she was everything she is now – before the Cardinal, before Athos, before even Sarazin.  Some of the women whom Ninon had been sheltering in her salon had reminded her uncomfortably of the trapped creature she had been.  Before the Red Guard had arrived, they had been blooming, cautiously but steadily, into something other than the twisted, thorny thing Milady is now.  And so Milady suspects Ninon is the only person she has ever met who _might_ have saved her back then, and Milady uses the very feature of her character that would have protected her as leverage to coerce her into confessing.

            Milady has learned a lot about the tools that can prompt confessions since she first started working for the Cardinal.  She has never been bothered by red hot pliers and daggers, the other implements for which there are no names, or the sight of men reduced to wrecks of human beings, begging her to kill them.  But the Cardinal had also taught her the subtler methods of coercion, and he had been forthrightly blunt when he had told her that these could be far harder on the interrogator’s conscience than simple physical torture.

            Milady does not always agree with her employer on matters of human psychology, and she had long privately disagreed with him on this point.  It had seemed to be evidence of his piety, his concern with God’s judgment and the state of his immortal soul.  In some things, he could be far more conventional than she.  But when she threatens Ninon with the deaths of her fellow women, Ninon’s gasp echoes much louder in her ears than any of the cries of the people she had physically tormented had ever done.  Ninon trembles before her, locked behind the iron bars of the cell, and in that moment Milady fiercely _hates_ the circumstances that have brought them to this point.  For the first time in this whole affair, Ninon looks like she might cry, and Milady hates that as well.

            She does not hate herself, but she hates that they live in a world where _someone_ is doing this to the comtesse.

            In a different world, she might have been protected by this woman.  In a different world, she herself might protect this woman.  She might have broken her out of her cell – picked the lock, taken her arm and hushed her questions, and walked her out past the guards, bold as brass, ‘under the pretext of acting on the Cardinal’s orders.  She still could – this doesn’t have to end here, with the light dulling in the other woman’s eyes as she realizes just how trapped she truly is, like a cornered animals finally looking up at the weapon poised to kill it.

            Instead, she tells her to confess to poisoning the Cardinal as well and leaves her with the metaphorical rope with which she will hang herself.

**Author's Note:**

> This ought to function on its own as a complete fic, but stay tuned for a (hopefully much longer) continuation of this into a series that goes wildly AU after the end of season 1, features much more sapphic angel imagery, and brings the UST to RST.


End file.
